Hi everyone, after making many Martial art and trapper sins, Ive come to find a combo of items that allows one to have fantastic balance of melee kick some butt goodness without giving up much on damage in the trap tree. This can be played equally well on either side. The downfall normally for kicker sins is the lack of an aoe attack that actually takes enemies down. Insert Rift

Sins are the true swiss army knives of builds, able to run everywhere in the game with ample crowd control, multiple damage sources and even summons. As a comparable build, the Rift-a-din does less physical damage and attacks slower. He does not get summons nor the crowd control a sin is capable of.
My character requirement that Can take down the ubers and run every other spot in the game. If the char cannot solo Everything, then it's of no use to me.

The down side, is this build is another one based on game items and if you do not have most of the ideal items you lose effectiveness.

The info collected here is nothing new, and I cannot claim credit for anything but the time I'm taking to compile it for you.

Here is another Rift sin oriented build, with enough difference between our approach to make it worthwhile for me to attempt another guide for it.The Riftkicker
by Ava

What makes this Rift sin different is the focus I went for on this build in eeking out the max orb damage possible, while balancing durabilty. At the same time we want max trap damage and good kicker stats too. This is a Hardcore char afterall.

There is only 2 scepter's that this can be made in War scepter (ideal) and Caddie's. War scept is both easier to find and cheaper to repair. These have a base wsm of -10. This means we need another 30 ias to hit the quickest kick followup, Shooting for 8/3/3/3/3/3 fpa. This gives us over 5 attacks a second. While the added elemental damages are nice cake mods, the real reason we're using rift is the chance to cast Frozen orb. With the right combo of items we can actually put out as much frozen orb damage as an orb sorcy. What advantage we have over the sorc counterpart is the fact we do not suffer a casting delay. It's very common to kick out 3/4 and even the rare 5 orbs in a single attack cycle. This gives us ultimate AOE in addition to all the usual kick damages the target will also face.

However you cut it , these are the finished char goals

48 or 86 FHR
75+ all res in hell. Overstack of 120% for Uber Meph
1200 min base life before bo or sages
50% min chance to block
8/3/3 kicks or better.
the ability to have at least 50% cb via stashed item for bosses and ubers.
lifetap via dracs or wand. Critical for uber running.

Skill Layout in simple Fashion:

Martial Arts Tree

20dtalon

Dragon Talon is chosen for it's ability to apply various mods like the chance to cast on our Rift. This attack is among the fastest in the game which means proc'ing mods is a cinch. Because it's also physical we have something to leach with.

Full 20 points advised for Maximum phy damage , and a Hefty Ar bonus. It helps if you can get enough points for a total of 6 kicks. This requires a skill level of 30

20 Death sentry
Useful for it's ce and added light damage20 light sentry
our main trap huge damage and another form of damage.

20 Shockweb
Increase light sentry damage and is more useful then charged bolt sentry. As a sin we're allowed 5 traps out. For me I choose to use 4 lightsentries, and 1 deathsentry. Picking shockweb gives us the option to at least use the synergy skill in conjuction with our regular in play traps.

Shadow disciples

1 in all skills except:

Shadow Master. Put enough points in this skill to hit level 17 master with final items equipped. I ended up with 2 hard points in this skill.

Bos is our primary aura in use on all but some specific situations where we may need the extra res from fade. Either one of these skills is good at level 1. They will be boosted to adaquate levels. Some people may want to add another point in bos if it means hitting the next ias bp.

Once these core points are assigned any extra point should go to increasing your trap damage. The alternative is rest in venom.

Stating

Strength
As you can guess enough for gear. As a kicker we will have more str then most other chars. This is because we need to equip hurty boots. I advocate using double up'd goblin toes, the highest str req item we *need* requires 172str

Dex
Enough for Max block with Sanctuary Shield. Shoot for 50% block on Head hunter glory

Vit
Everything else.

Equipped Stuff

First off, again this build is not cheap. I am also not going to list every wep possiblity either. Just what I feel fits the theme and are a couple of the more popular options. As always Rare items have the potential to be the best. Good luck finding those.

Primary Wep: Rift War sceptor. I know you guys never saw this one coming..

Primary Shield. Head Hunters Glory shield, 3 socketed with 5/5 level cold facets. We get 15% skill damage much needed for boosting Frozen orb and another -15 enemy res. This coupled with infinnty merc means -100 all enemy res. This is the only unique shield in the game that has 3 sockets to make the most with. A 4 socketed faceted monarch would also work, but you'd give up other stats the Head hunter offers us. If you wanted to sacrifice a bit of damage the only other option that jumps out at me is a Mosher's shield with 2facets

Helmet: Only one will do, Nightwings for the added cold skill damage and +2 skills that helps both our trap and melee attacks. 15 ias jewel with ammy let us exceed the 30 ias we need for preffered ias.

Belt: Tgods is my preffered Hardcore belt of choice on any char. Nos coil String of ears get mention.

Holy freeze doesnt seem that handy since our sin has fantastic crowd control with COS and FO and a Shadow Master

Wep: Infinnity is hands down by far the best option. Increases all of our elemental damages. As a bonus this wep puts out great physical damage and even has cb of its own. The only downside here is no leach and it's slow.

Armor: treachory. Has nearly everything the merc needs. More ias, res through Fade and pdr too!

Helm: Vampgaze. Basicaly this slot is needed for life leach. the dr% offered here is a real boon. Because it came from my zon, it has a 15% ias jewel in it.
Tal helm, Crown of thieves and Andy's helm are also fitting.

What about the Evil IM curse?
Play as a trapper. With our better then avg gear we have full powered LS/DS

Bust out our 1 point Blade fury
Throw Gimmersheds at stuff
Unequip boots and keep kicking. We still get the ctc's and elemental damage. Without a boot on we do so little physical damage we can kick with impunity

Play by Numbers:

For Level 82 Hardcore sin of mine
BeatenByA_Girl

Full physical damage Dragon talon + All the elemental added damage from gear/charms

still maxing shockweb for more damage but..
Light sentry damage 4700 per trap. 5 traps available. After conviction we're looking at around 7K+ light damage per trap. Holy cow its only getting stronger.

Shock web: currently at about 1200

As Always, use charms to cover what your missing. Fhr, Res, Life and after those are addressed Skill gc's would be next. I feel Trap Gc's would be the most useful for this build.

For Ubers I remove Rift and the Cold shield and use Fleshripper+ sanctuary shield.

So thanks for reading. In conclusion I want to say this is one of the most effective do it all chars in the game. With all the fireworks going off it's also one of the flashiest. This is my 1st attempt at a guide here so feedback is welcomed.

Good guide, I am just putting together my PvM/Uber Assassin at the moment - (Blade Fury, DTalon) and I have had to reconfigure my controls as assassins require a key mash!
It needed done as I was lazy with the F keys!

Anyway this is one for the future nice work. Will try it when I get Rift sorted.

MrKaxe , the truth is while Vor and Rift work to a degree without say the nightwing's and facet shield, It's really those 2 specific items that bump FO's killing power from mediocre damage to damage that rivals a sorc. We're talking a 30% skill damage bump with another -15 enemy res.

Tai hun , If only you knew the amount of high level char I've got going right now , pally and non of course. You'd probably tell me I play way to much. Speaking of which It's been a longtime since we've gamed together. This Sin is on account Sara4[eF] and she's getting alot of play to date.

Poor gear will work just fine for the trap side, ie use some shopped +skill to trap/sin skills claws.
Poor gear will work fine for regular boss hunting. ie Fleshripper

Poor gear will not work well for Ubers
Poor gear will not provide substantial frozen orb damage.
Poor gear will result in weak summon or weaker traps if you need to add more to the master.

+skills really adds alot to everything we do as a sin.
with 1-2 points invested :
I've almost a full powered master.
I pull over 1000%ed if I want to use tiger strike and Dtail.
Close to level 20 venom

Very nice! I learned several new things...one of the most important being that +% cold damage from Nightwing's and facets does work with elemental damage released from procs. I wasn't aware of that. In fact, that's going to serious affect my thinking about a "Rift" Necro I've been gathering equipment for and my VoR Conviction Zealot rebuild (he was my project this last weekend). I have quite a few pieces of equipment needed to make a Rift-a-Sin, although I'll need to find another Lem to make my "Rift" War Scepter. I have an almost perfect one and an Ormus's Robes w/ cold facet in it on my Frost Nova Sorc. And I'll need an "Infinity"...dang it. I'd better start to trade for more Guls then to cube.

Does this +% and -% cold damage bonus from Nightwing's and facets also work on a Merc? (The reason why I'm asking this is because I might kit a "Rift" Merc for that Necro build I mentioned.)

Also, I was surprised when you mentioned that up to 5 Frozen Orbs can be released by kicks. The best I ever got from my "Rift" Merc (currently on my VoR Zealot) is 3 Frozen Orbs in a row, and I can get up to 3 Frozen Orbs with my VoR on Zeal. 4-5 Frozen Orbs would do a whopping amount of damage at the damage you mentioned.

"Rift" is one of those great overlooked rune words. Almost no one uses it on Bnet, but yet it's so powerful in the right builds.

Good to know. For some reason, it had never really occurred to me that the +/- applied to procs. I've been running my VoR Zealot with a near perfect Nightwing's on his head, and it makes a noticeable difference in damage output. On Sara's build, even better.

Vor stands for Voice of reason runeword and it's similar to that of rift. Rift was choosen for it's higher level chance to cast frozen orb. Vor is viable too.

As for the IM , well there is only a couple spots in the game, the Chaos level and the worldstone. Sometimes the merc dies, I just res it. Most of the time I can play thru im spots without losing the merc. I Keep TP on hotkey, so I can usualy get back to town to clense the IM 90% of the time I'd say.

I saw you mentioned that "on Attack" means as long as you are pointing to an enemy, clicking, and not actually hitting. would this also work with Blade fury? as well as just being half a screen away and holding "shift" + "attack" click?

and you could potentially start spamming Orb?

are there any other strong characters out there utilizing CtC off of runewords...

i know there are the Dual Dream sorcs out there, but they seem very 1 dimensional as Lit Immunes will be all over them.

I like the Sin because you get Physical dmg + 2 elements. are there any other effective phys+2 or 3 elemental damaging builds?